David Pierce (52:40)
Okay, I love this question with my whole heart. And if you know me or have followed anything that I do, you know that as a true, like, productivity, computer hack nerd, this speaks to me. So I have two big thoughts on this that I just wanted to share that this hotline question made me think about. Um, the first is this interview I did about two years ago with this woman named Laura Mae Martin, who was at the time the executive productivity advisor at Google, which is very cool title, but what it means essentially is she was like an internal consultant helping people be more productive inside of Google. And one of her biggest theories is that Everybody should spend 10 minutes, 10 minutes learning how to use their software. Like, she had this idea that maybe when you download an app, you should be required by the app to spend 10 minutes mucking around in the settings to get it set up the way that you want, or going through a really elaborate setup flow that actually teaches you all the features. It's the sort of thing that I think resonates with me still to this day because of questions like this, right? Most people don't know how to use most of their things, right? You set up slack, you learn the very bare minimum number of things required to slack successfully with your colleagues, and then you kind of never think about it again. And what you end up with is this weird mishmash of lots of tools that all kind of do the same thing but do it slightly differently. And you're not making full use of anything. So I think I am a big believer in actually it is worth taking the time to learn how something works. One thing I recommend to lots of people and to all of you is go to the YouTube channel of whatever app you download. Any sufficiently complicated piece of software these days seems to have a YouTube channel where they do a bunch of, you know, explainers, or they'll interview users about how they use the app. Raycast, which I think I've mentioned on the show a few times before, does a particularly good job of this notion. Does it really? Well, just like helping you understand what this app is and some reasonable, maybe non obvious, ways to use it. Do I think every piece of software should be a lot more obvious about how it works and how you can use it? Yes, but I also loathe the scourge that is like tool tips and pop ups telling you about all the new features and having it both ways is very hard. So I think spending a few minutes forcing yourself to spend a few minutes to say, okay, how does this thing work and what can I actually do in it goes an incredibly long way. This also happens to be a thing that AI is actually unusually well suited to do. One thing I think about AI is that it is very good at finding and reading and synthesizing the manual. And I mean the manual in like the broadest possible way, right? If you have a literal manual for a dishwasher, it can find things in that manual very quickly. I know this for a fact because my dishwasher sucks and this happens to me all the time. But you can also get an AI tool like Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT to just give you a sense of what is possible inside of a tool. So like, one thing I've been doing a lot is just asking, you know, I need to do xyz. Here are, here are the apps that I use every day. Are any of these apps well suited to doing that thing? I need to, I need to a way to quickly text myself reminders. What's a good way to do that? And it'll actually be like, oh, actually Slack is very good at this because you can just set yourself reminders for Slack messages inside of Slack and it will send you reminders. Cool feature most people probably don't know about. Super useful. So asking a tool like this what is possible and how you can do things best with the tools you already have goes a long way towards starting to solve some of this problem. Right? And the thing like Mission Control on the Mac is really complicated because on the Mac there are a thousand ways to switch between apps, right? You can go to the Applications folder, you can go to the Dock, you can do Command Tab, you can do Mission Control, you can go to Launcher like it's feature creep in a way that I don't think is actually very useful. And in general, if you don't know Mission Control exists on the Mac, I don't know that your life is any worse or you're any worse at your using your computer. But if you are finding little tiny problems that you have things that you're doing over and over that don't feel right. Small things where you're like, how do I get from here to here? Why am I constantly, you know, copying and pasting? Why can't I find xyz? Those are good problems to work with chatbots on because a again, they're very good at finding needles in haystacks. Like, if. If AI large language models are good at one thing, it is searching through haystacks to find needles. You have to verify that the needle is real and correct. But it's very good at that process in a way that humans, I think are not. And frankly, it's not a good use of most people's time or a thing that I've discovered is that you can actually start to build tiny bits of software with some of these tools to solve some of these problems for you. In general, a thing that I need a lot is I need markdown links from web pages. Just a small thing I need. I'm constantly pasting them into other Google Docs where I want them better formatted than just like a bare link. There are a bunch of wacky tools and Chrome extensions and stuff for this. But in. In five minutes and like three prompts, I was able to make one of these with Claude code that now just sits on my computer and I just drag a link into it and it gives me a markdown link. Like, it's great. I drag a. I drag a tab, it gives me a markdown link in the clipboard. I put it wherever I need. Perfect. No notes. I spent a lot of time working on different kinds of productivity tools. Like, I got really excited about. I'm just gonna vibe code. My perfect productivity app that went terribly for reasons actually I should talk about on the show, but not here. But then I found something like there's this app called Raindrop, which is a bookmarking app that just lets you save links. Again, I don't know if you've noticed this. A lot of my life is just like moving links from one place to another. Raindrop is great. I think the app itself is really ugly. It's like really good, really stable infrastructure. It saves all the right stuff. It does everything you need. I just don't like looking at the app. But Raindrop has an API. So I just went to Claude code in this case and was like, hey, I don't like the way Raindrop looks, but I want to use the API. I'm a paid customer. I have all the access I need. Can you just build me a very quick, simple front end? And now I have a webpage that is literally just a super simple front end to Raindrop that just makes the thing look better and gives me the two keys I need in order to manage the links in my list. This is the scope of software that I think is really interesting for AI, for Most people like to sit down and say, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to rewrite my whole company's HR software so that we don't have to pay for it anymore. Like, saaspocalypse stuff is all fine and good and I think A, largely impossible for most people and B, largely irrelevant for most people. But the idea that you can build a little bookmarklet or a little menu bar app or a little tiny utility to accomplish something for you that you do all the time is real. I've done it over and over again and it works. And as long as the scope is pretty narrow and you're very clear on exactly what you need to do, these tools can do it. So I think to the extent that AI can actually help you A, figure out how to use your devices and B, kind of use them for you and start to solve some of the problems that your devices have, I think that's really powerful. I do believe everybody should spend some time looking at the settings menu, understanding how it works. Watch the YouTube videos, watch them at like 2x speed, even like breeze through a bunch of YouTube videos. But you'll just get a sense of sort of the list of features that exist that you can start to mess with and play with and think about. That is the stuff that I think goes a long way towards making your computing life better. We tend to sort of reinvent wheels over and over and try to build new tools because the existing tools don't quite work when, at least in my case, most of what it is is I don't completely understand how to use the existing tools or with some tiny tweaks, the existing tools can work. For me, that has made my computing life a lot easier. I find myself blowing everything up much less often and instead just doing little tiny tweaks. Also, I should just say, before we get out of here, shout out to Bixby. The Samsung AI assistant that many years ago was based on the idea that actually what your assistant on your phone should do is help you use your phone. It should make it so that you don't have to dig through the settings to find Bluetooth. It should make it so that you don't have to figure out where notification settings are and how to turn them off. It should make it so that you just tell your phone what you need it to do and it can take you there. That is a good and correct and right way for AI to work. And I think the tools that we have now are actually delivering on that idea that Bixby had a long time ago. My computer and the AI on my computer should help me use my computer, should teach me how to use my computer. And as much as they are learning how to use my computer for me, they should just take all of the steps in between me scrolling around and finding things and just take me where I need to be. These LLMs can do that, Claude can do that, Gemini can do that, ChatGPT can do that. It requires a little bit of trust in the system to allow it to sort of run rampant all over your computer. But at least in my case, so far it's been. It's been really great. So, you know, shout out to Bixby. You were right, just way too early and way too weird. Anyway, that's it for the show today. Thank you as always for watching and listening. Thank you to Allison for being here. Listening to my bonkers takes about phones. If you have thoughts about which phone I should have picked, if you're very upset with me for picking an iPhone, please know that A I understand and B I want to hear from you about why and what you think I got wrong. As always, the email is vergecastheverge.com, the hotline is 866 verge11 call email about anything and everything. The absolute love hearing from you. The Verge cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer and Travis Larchuk. Nilai and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the news. We've got some Apple 50 next week stuff to tell you about to get ready for. Go listen to decoder. Go listen to the Verge cast. Go listen to version history. 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